The present invention relates to a printing system for printing job data and a method implemented with the printing system.
In a printing system comprising a printer and a data processor (referred to as a PC hereinafter) for providing the printer with job data such as image data or text data, a printer driver is commonly installed on the PC for allowing the PC to control the printer in order to identify the printer to which the job data is delivered. The printing conditions including the time of print output and the number of prints can be arbitrarily determined by the user on the printer driver, and the information for the printing conditions is transmitted together with the job data to the printer for controlling the printing action. There is a known technique in which the information for the printer including the current action mode (for example, paper feeding, printing, or paper discharging), the printing state of the job data, the error (for example, feeding error), and the information for optional equipments (e.g. a duplex printing unit and a finisher) including the existence of the optional equipment connected to the printer, the errors can be obtained by the printer driver during communicating with the printer, and the informations can be displayed as status information for the printer and the optional equipments. In such a technique, the document name, the owner name, and the printing registration time at the printer for the job data may also be displayed together with the printing state of the job data (printing or waiting).
The printing system has a secret printing function where a job data which is confidential is tagged with a password by the user operating the printer driver and can thus be printed out only when the password is entered on the printer. In the prior art, the status data such as the document name and the owner name of the job, the printing registration time of the printer are displayed on the printer driver in case of the confidential printing as well as case of common printing. This may deteriorate the secrecy of the job data by guessing its content from the document name.
The present invention has been developed in view of the above technical drawback and its object is to maintain the secrecy of a job data required for the confidential printing in the display of a status data indicative of a printing state of the job data.